


X Marks The Box

by Go0se



Series: Origin Story [3]
Category: Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys (Album), My Chemical Romance
Genre: Injuries description, Mentions of kidnapping, Other, Past Character Death, Pre-SING
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-24
Updated: 2015-07-24
Packaged: 2018-04-10 01:18:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4371599
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Go0se/pseuds/Go0se
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everyone meets their makers eventually. That's as true in the Zones as anywhere else. Being the resident caller of the ghosted and the lost, Doctor Death-Defying had seen more pass than most.</p>
            </blockquote>





	X Marks The Box

**Author's Note:**

> Based on prompt: _Any Killjoy/any, “And I could save you, baby, but it isn't worth my time_  
>  _Cause even if I saved you, there's a million more in line“_  
>  Title and prompt text from 'Guitar Hero' by Amanda Palmer. A lot of this is also based on/feeding into my own long-ass story (wooooo). So. Please forgive that, or feel free to ask questions. All handwaving or mistakes are my own fault.
> 
> ====

===

  
The tape clicked and whirred as it slowed down. Death-Defying leaned forward, flipping the 'live' switch on his mic.   
  
“And that was [Stairway To Heaven](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IS6n2Hx9Ykk), by the old and good Led Zeppelin, going out to you high-flyers up in the Two mountains. Hope you're all holding onto your boots out there. I'm your radio pirate for the night fly rates, Doctor Death-Defying, and this is _WKIL._ ”  
  
Something reverberated through the wheels of his chair. Death-Defying covered his mic with one hand and peered over his left armrest, frowning. His two-way radio was buzzing on the floor, lit up on an incoming channel.  
  
He took his hand off the mic. “Apologies, folks-- just had to wet the old whistle with a sweet stuff missile. Which, ahem, reminds me that our sponsors for tonight for the roof and the electro-juice are the Scrubs in Three, holders of fine land and finer resources, clear water included. If you have stuff to give and you need stuff to take away, climb on up to the Slides and scurry on down through the winding roads. But remember, everything's neutral ground out here, so take care not to blow up or you'll be blown away.  
"Now this next tune is of a more _spiritual_ feelual. ['Step',](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mDxcDjg9P4) by Vampire Weekend, a blast from the past out of Old Old York. Here to keep you one jump ahead of a draculoid day, WKIL Slaughtermatic Sounds.” Drawling the last three words, he hit the next button on the tape and flipped the mic silent again.

 

With a grunt he leaned down the side of his chair and grabbed his radio with one hand. He sucked in breath to push himself back up, trying to lean away as much as he could from the travelling pain radiating out of his bad hip that'd been bothering him all day. Double-checking that the mic wasn't hot, he rolled his chair backwards until it nudged the wall of records behind him.  
Calls for the show came in on the hackneyed landline; calls from this transmitter meant business of a different kind. It needed some care-taking. He switched the two-way on.

“House of the soundwaves,” he said into the mouthpiece. “Who's up?”

Nothing but grey audio static. He frowned. “Double that, starshine, you're not breaking through there.”  
The connection shrieked and warbled. Death-Defying grabbed a spare bandanna from his worktable and blocked his non-occupied ear with it, squinting in concentration. He could make out a scratchy voice shouting something behind the fuzz.  
Suddenly a burst of clarity came through: it was Fun Ghoul of the Fabulous crew's voice, ranting on without realizing he was being heard: “--f the fucking sand, and miles away by now, god fucking knows wh--”  
“Whoa, pump your brakes. Ghoul?” Death-Defying asked. The connection to the other end faded in and out. “Ghoul!”  
“--ust _gone!_ ” Ghoul burst out, and it was the pure anguish cracks in his voice that seemed to convince the radiowaves to finally settle down. The connection opened up as clear as a clear day. Death-Defying could hear Fun Ghoul's uneven breath, someone else steadily swearing choked-up like in the background (Jet Star?), and a filler sound he recognized instantly. Wheels humming on concrete.  
“Hey, hey-- listen,” Death-Defying cautioned, putting his hand up ineffectively. The bandana fell away from his opposite ear as he did and he heard the song he'd queued up was half-done already. Damn. “Sunshine I get you're twisted up, but the static's not letting on about what. This connection's to unconnectable to talk over. How about y'all drive over here as soon as you can? Figure out whatever is needing figuring, faces to faces.”  
“--sn't--” The static was spiking back again.  
Death-Defying looked from the transistor to the tape deck on the table. People tended to trip out a little if he wasn't back on air when the tunes were up. And not for nothing was it that some of them used WKIL as a early-warn system. It'd saved lives before. Whatever this was, it didn't sound like it'd be sorted in the next minute and thirty seconds. “Ghoul-- no disrespect, I got a show to run. Are any of y'all bleeding out?”  
“Not here,” Ghoul said, more tired than he was a minute ago. His voice buzzed and crackled.  
He frowned at that, but pushed on. “The Am about to blow?”  
“Negatory.”  
“Shiny,” Death-Defying said. He sat back, rubbing his eyes with his palm. “I'm real sorry about whatever went down, but I can't chitchat just this minute. Yeah?”  
“... yeah. We're on the road. Be there by sundown,” and the channel went dead.

Death-Defying picked his bandana off of the grip of his wheels where it'd fallen and pushed the radio into the back pocket of his chair. He sighed loudly.  
While the Fabulous killjoys were far from the first crew he's had run along for him, they burned hotter than any he'd found since early on. It was a chemical reaction, almost; they all catch each other's radiation, getting bigger and harsher and brighter above all else than they'd ever be alone. Death-Defying respected that. But he'd been around long enough to know what flocks to bright things.   
  
A loud knock from the doorway made him look up. Show Pony had rolled in. Their hair was caked with dust and they had a duffel bag strapped across their shoulders, bulkier then it'd been when they left. They waved peppily, but stopped when they saw his face. The bag landed at their feet with a rattling thump. They pulled off their goggles and mouthpiece to reveal a frown. “What's happened?”  
“Fabulous ones. Something went and, uh, got themselves blasted,” Death-Defying said tiredly. He rubbed the side of his face. “Or somebody. We'll know when we see whatever rolls up. Nightfall,” he added to answer the question he could see forming on his partner's face. “Just up out front.”  
Show Pony rolled the rest of the way into the room and steadied themself on the side of the radio desk. Their face hardened into a pre-emptive grimace. “Not going to be a party, huh.”  
“Negatory.” Death-Defying echoed. Then, with a shake of his head, he rolled his chair forward again and gestured for Show Pony to grab another tape from the piles. 'Step' was on its last ways out.  
They did, pressing the music back into Death-Defying's palm. They kept their hand wrapped around his as the last percussion eased off and the radio pirate picked up the mic again.

  
He went through three other mixtapes by lunch and one full album for the Midday Marathon. He took two other calls in that time on the two-way, plus four more via Show Pony's transmission station on the inner-internet. Usual things, for the most part. Tommy Chowmein had some hot deals he wanted to cut airtime with. There was another fire fair going up around the perimeter fence in One, come one come all not afraid to die. Weather warnings up and down.  
More seriously, someone radioed in news that some twizzlered paintfaces had drove their van right into a chop shop out Three's circuit; Death-Defying didn't stop shaking his head while listening to _that_ tale being spun. He paused the marathon to call out to anyone topheavy that they needed to recast their nets if they wanted an actual doctor to help them with their dosed-up radiation meds and dosed-down anything else, not even to mention when nature's loudest call sounded. The paintfaces were real apologetic about it once they'd come down, 'course, but apologies don't bring back a generator or a previously-solid insulated walls. Thankfully one of the buzzes Show Pony got an hour later solved the problem. A crackly-voiced girl said she knew a girl who knew a starshine who had med access and, even more surprisingly, clean water for any patients who wanted to trundle over to her. Little ones double-welcome. Show Pony had rattled up from the tiny shack's even tinier basement space where all the cables were coiled and told Death-Defying the news; he'd passed it on out to the airwaves and any ears who'd grab it. It wasn't a fixed safehouse but it was something, and that counted for a lot. They had a sprinkling of calls back in radiating both grief and gratitude with a emphasis on the second, so Death-Defying called it steady overall.

He flipped some more tapes. Show Pony worked with the wicked filler, trying to figure how to beef it up for those in the outer Zones. They got mouse code transmissions over the innernet, switched them from noise to signal and sent them forward. Around midday they surfaced to grab some fresh Pup kernels from the duffel bag they'd traded full, tossing Death-Defying a couple packets. Both of them ate together.  
Neither of them forgot the Fabulous killjoys were coming. Not for a second. Death-Defying remembered Ghoul's wrecked voice and Show Pony remembered the heaviness in Death-Defying's face. But they had other pedals to push, levers to pull; this one section of the desert, for now, spinning around the two of them like a record on a table.

 

*  
  
  
Night came cool and blue-toned. Where they were, everything'd eased off enough to be outside at night without worrying about rad-poisoning or needing a rebreather. (Unless you were in what remained of the forests; no one wanted to be stuck catching smoke without a second face.) Death-Defying and Show Pony waited at the old weightstation outside the radio shack, blasters in close reach. They sat through the sunset and about an hour of the half-half moon on their faces.  
When the familiar Trans Am finally rolled up its headlights were the only bright spots on the ground. Its doors all slammed. The Fabulous crew stumbled out, leaning on each other to stay upright, headlight-outlined silhouettes moving like sludge on a hot day.  
Death-Defying's heart sank down past his gut. There was only four of them. The fifth and smallest silhouette that should've been there, should've  _always_ been there-- usually in the middle between Kobra and Jet-- was a gape in space.  
Show Pony asked the obvious question sharp and accusing, an angry snap into the languid air. “Where's Honey?”  
For a minute nothing made a sound except the desert.  
“Where the _fuck_ \--” Show Pony started, louder, only stopping when Death-Defying held up a hand.  
“Inside,” he said.

 

It was a tight fit in the little radio booth with all them. Death-Defying took his place behind the desk and surveyed the damage.  
In such close quarters it was impossible to miss that the Fabulous killjoys looked a wreck. They clustered near the door, hanging off each other like scared greens straight out of Bat City, to a one all charred and scratched up. The usual desert funk stuck to them, the smell a runner almost forgot until you went from an open-air place to a small room, and then forgot again soon as you got out again. But layered over that familiar stink were the less familiar smells of blood and pain and lightning.  
  
Less _benignly_ familiar, anyhow. Death-Defying remembered the stench of battle leftovers more well than he ever wanted to.

  
Show Pony hoisted themself up on the desk by the radio setup (now shut off for the night), sitting sideways. Their face was pinched and hollowed out under the ember emergency lights. They asked, “How?”  
Sure as hell not an easy question, but simple and fair. The Fabulous killjoys' roadgoblin wouldn't've been snatched without fighting. She was smaller than all of them but hardly a sandmite anymore, and she'd known how to run fast, hide well and handle blasters even before she'd gotten to them. She'd only learned to be faster and sharper under the diner's roof. With the four of them watching the girl's sides and her back, and her fitting with theirs like a jigsaw piece that kept rounding off edges, they made a solid border most days. Rare that anything got through.  
_How_?  
Looking at them all, Death-Defying could guess. But he needed to know from their own mouths.  
  
“Korse,” Poison spat out the answer. “And his fucking dracs. Fucking surrounded us out by the gravel pits.” His voice shook as much as his hand when he wiped sweat and blood-stuck hair off his face. He kept his other arm wrapped around Kobra's waist like an anchor. When he closed his eyes the backs of them were bruised, regret pulling her inkbrush all over his face. “We'd just-- we'd just been cruising, and then--”  
“Ambush,” Kobra continued for him. He was leaning back against Poison with all the fierceness the gesture could have, and all the sorrow. His face was screwed up and damp. His left arm dangled in its sleeve, a smell like burnt meat and wires floating out from his power glove-covered hand. “There were too many of them too quick-- had, fucking, bottles and shit, knives-- she lost her blaster in the dust. None of us had extras, we. We all got hit.” He looked over at Jet Star.  
Jet was standing next to the wall on the other side of Kobra, keeping one hand near his head. A bandage, partly obscured by his singed cloud of dark hair, stretched across his right eye around to his ear. One streak of unexpected grey ran through his hair too: the kind people got after a huge shock at close range. His head was swaying a little on his shoulders.  
Most likely loose from the pain patches, Death-Defying thought.  Jet Star was a brave man, but no one was brave enough to withstand a blaster-burn to the eye and not scream bloody murder without nerve-dulling drugs.  
Jet met his gaze after a second and returned Death-Defying's nod.  “Went to Bertha Bonesaw,” he said to confirm. His voice was raspy and gritted down in pitch from its normal tones. He gestured to his face. “Patched us up best as she could. After we woke up.”  
“She was just gone,” Ghoul said with an empty voice from the other side of Poison. He'd have been horizontal without the record-wall he was leaning on. Stitching that started at the corner of his mouth and stretched halfway along his face flaked off little rust spots when he spoke.  
“I saw her get shoved in the van,” Kobra mumbled. “After all of us were already down in the dust, they just carried her out like a bag of rocks-- I couldn't do anything--”  
Poison pressed closer to him, kissing Kobra's cheek and jaw and the tears that slid down them.

  
Show Pony made a sorrowful noise and made to reach out to the four. Death-Defying coughed, drawing Pony's attention over, and he shook his head. Pony drew back.    
Being a doctor, and a solider besides, meant that he'd seen a lot of kinds of grief over the years. The kind the Fabulous four were bleeding into the air just now was private. The group had just gone through a serious loss. They deserved a room alone to collectively pour this out.  
  
But there wasn't any alone room. There wasn't time.

Death-Defying gave them a second to themselves. Then he spoke up again. “I'm real sorry,” he said. “ _Real_ sorry. A motorbaby's a terrible thing to lose. But why'd you zoom here?”  
He waited for wilting, one of them to say _nowhere else to go_. Instead the group straightened as one, their faces going sharp and angry. Not at him, at something in the distance. He sat back warily.

  
“You need to help us,” Jet said.  
Poison in particular had murder in his eyes. “We're getting her out.”  
  
  
Silence for a second. Then Show stood up off the desk as the realization hit them. “You don't even know they brought her--”  
“We do,” Poison interrupted. “We do.”  
“All of you'll go up like a grassfield in a hotsnap,” Death-Defying told them.  
“We're getting her out,” Jet repeated.  
They all stared across the small room at each other, four and two.

  
Show Pony, gorgeous and stubborn person that they were, started arguing back more, fiercely.  But Death-Defying's mind started whirring.  
  
  
Resident littlest killjoy Honey Grenade had been kidnapped. Awful, but if it was up to Death-Defying, he'd keep a rescue on a backburner until there was time to move. It wasn't like she'd be _harmed._ As much of a grudge as he had against BL/IND, he remembered the Industry didn't hurt children; young people were too valuable a resource to waste, too easily fit back into the mold BLI was trying to make them from. Of course once the Dracs delivered her back to the city centre she'd be fed her prescribed drugs and sat in front of eyetwisters until she said her story backwards and forwards and forgot her name, but drugs wore off, and stories could be changed as needed from the outside, and names remade. She'd be kept until there was good time to grab her.  In some case, she'd be safer in the City than in the sand.

But Battery City was just that: a case, likely to snap shut. A trap.  
And this wasn't up to him, because the sugarsprite wasn't Death-Defying's people. She might've been if Show Pony had brought her and the litteling in way back when, but instead she'd tripped through the desert for a year and a day on her own and then fell sunsick into the diner where the Fabulous crew roosted. She'd become as fixed in with them as the sand in the soles of their boots. Helping hold them together. They helped hold her up, and all of them loved her. To leave her in enemy hands for a second longer than they absolutely could was unthinkable. He understood that. He did.

Fuck, but he was heavy-brained today. And tired. The background radiation of pain he always lived with was increasing in volume, and seeing the Fabulous' four faces in front of his eyes was making him see triple in his head.

The thing was that everyone met their makers eventually. That's as true in the Zones as anywhere else. Being the resident caller of the ghosted and the lost, he'd seen more pass than most, and being something of a central spoke meant that most folks who'd passed had passed by him on the way out. At least half of them had been hurt and vengeful and full-throttling until there was no road left to throttle on, like the four killjoys in front of him now.  
The last few Runners who'd roared by him were particularly bright in his memory-light: Susan Shine and her Bursts, and Allie Between before them. Death-Defying had thought he'd talked them all out of it, two separate times. They'd argued for days and then said they'd stand still, which he believed, right up until he got wind of their shades on the ground when he and Cherri Cola rolled the van out to see their ghosts.

 

Killjoys never learned from their mistakes. Never learned from warning, neither. The Fabulous crew would leave, and they wouldn't be coming back, and he couldn't talk them out of it. Trying to save the group from itself would be a waste of time.

He put his hand over his face and closed his eyes.

  
“D?” Show Pony twisted around on the desk.  
Death-Defying shook his head and pulled his back up straight in his chair. “When're you bailing out,” he said to the four on the other side of the room. Small on a good moment, the room seemed practically claustrophobic now.  
“Soon as we can.” Ghoul said. His face was both empty and glowing with fury.

 _Shellshock._ That was what the whitecoats in charge of the physical well-being of Death-Defying's platoon would've said, to look at Ghoul now. More like blastshocked, Death-Defying thought. No guns had been made that used bullets in years. He grit his teeth. These ones were lost; he still had others to think of. Like the girl herself, like they were trying to.  
He said, in front of all the words he could say that wouldn't make a damned difference, “So what can we do you for?”

  
  
*  
  
  
A mediocore hour later the Trans Am's back headlights faded into the dark of the road. Death-Defying watched them go. Then, with a little difficulty, he turned his wheelchair around and rolled it up to the van that doubled as anyone's, but particularly he and Pony's, mobile-home. Cherri had swung by for some roadtunes and did them the favour of bringing the vehicle around the front of the radioshack.

Show was waiting for him already, beside the sheet of scrap metal that served for Death-Defying's up and down-ramp.  
When he'd gotten in they closed the van doors behind him and hauled up the scrap sheet, slotting it into its carved grooves in the wall, where it'd stay until it was needed again. Pony stayed facing the wall while Death-Defying got himself out of his wheelchair and onto the thin cot mattress that was set up on the floor.  
  
Death-Defying grunted a little and then huffed upon finally removing his belt and his goggles, which he set beside his and Pony's blasters on the floor at his head. He pulled a thin blanket of stitched-together merch shirts--a 'thank you' from Mad Gear--off of the fold-down seats, shaking it over himself.  
Quiet settled in the van. Moonlight pooled through the windows. The desert's heat had leached back into the ground as it always did by this time of night, and the floor was cold to the touch where the scrub carpet had been worn through. Pony didn't even have their jacket on anymore. Death-Defying cleared his throat. “There's room for one more, y'know.”

Pony sighed under their breath but finally turned around, laying down on the narrow mattress with their back to Death-Defying. They pulled their share of the blanket over themself. Their shoulders were tight and miserable.  
  
Pony hadn't seen as many moving-ons as Death-Defying had, being in the desert for about six years less time than him, but they were no stranger to mourning. It was harder when the mournee was a roadgobllin, of course. All letting go's were. Especially now that it was Honey.  
Death-Defying remembered.  Pony had been the first one to've found the sugarhead (and her littler tag-along, at the time) out in the desert. They'd found out later, and told him, that it'd been just days after Honey's mother had gone down fighting the good fight against some Dracs in an old car hospital along Two's border. Pony had known the little girl longer than any of the others in the room. She was one of the Runners they most looked forward to seeing, out of all the crews and colonies that scurried by.  
And it wasn't like they had spite lost for the Fabulous ones either. Pony and the four were good friends. It'd be a stab in the heart to see them sorrowful at any time, let alone because they'd lost their youngest.

And now either Honey was gonna be stuck in the City's beating heart for a long time, or her four crewmates left behind would get their hearts stopped trying to rescue her from it. Or both, if the Fabulous crew should fail.

Death-Defying was both sore and sorry in his heart, but that didn't change anything. “They can't be helped, starshine,” he quietly told the back of Pony's neck. He rubbed Pony's shoulder with his hand, trying to loosen some of the hurt.

 

“You gonna play a song later?” Pony asked, after a time.  
Before Poison and the boys had left, they'd collectively asked Death-Defying for a tune to play them into the city. Not right then, or at sunrise, but when they actually went in. “We'll send you a flare,” Poison said, stubborness written on his every surface. Neither he or any of the other three had specified _what_ tune.

“Yeah,” Death-Defying said. "I've an idea."  
“Which?” Pony rolled over to look at him now, keeping their arm squashed to their body in the limited space and careful not to jostle his leg. It was a serious pain sharing one sleeping-space but the body heat was worth it. (Especially with additional benefits that came sometimes. But definitely not that night. The mood was all sour and pained.)

Death-Defying took a second to arrange his words the best way he could think. “You remember when the motorbaby first rolled into the studio, she asked me for something reminded her of her ma?”    
It'd been a sweet song she'd chosen, in its way. Definitely a desert song. Off of '21st Century Breakdown' on the greenest day, one of the albums from Before that described the Fires and chaos afterwards like they'd seen it. It was why Death-Defying kept the album on his shelves.

Pony was quiet. In the shadow of the front seats, Death-Defying couldn't see what their face was shifting to. He put his hand that'd been on their shoulder on their cheek instead, feeling the sharp edges of their jaw and the side of their skull through their long hair. “Pository. I listened to that one with her,” they said. “Down in the innernet space, while you all were talking.”  
Death-Defying nodded. He could feel Pony's face-muscles move reassuringly under his hand.

"You got a goodbye song for us, too?"  
He paused, then closed his eyes. During the long talk with the four, it'd been agreed that Pony, Death-Defying and Cherri Cola would be backup and getaway, sailing in to pull the youngling out from the chrome's claws on the streetcorner and then out from the City altogether. The Fabulous crew would act as the battering ram. "No," he answered. And he didn't plan too.  
  
  
“We're gonna be rolling into a graveyard,” Pony muttered.  
“We're not ghosts yet,” Death-Defying replied. It was the truest, and closest to comfort, thing he had. “Neither is she.”

  
  
Pony held still. Death-Defying wondered if they'd nod again, but eventually their sweetdrink-breath got smooth on his face and he knew they were asleep. He kept his hand on their hair. It was tangled and greasy but still soft, something easy to focus on.

  
He'd play [the song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfVdXCZZyBA) when the signal came in. Send it out to the airwaves, to all the eardrums and the irradiated sky. He'd let it be a call to arms for the Killjoys who wanted it, and a prayer for five of them, as much as he'd ever given for all the Runners big and small who he couldn't save.

 

=x=


End file.
